It was a regular day. The weather had turned and it was quite cold, although my kids could care less what the ol’ weatherman says and were still reliving the good times of summer in their shorts and t-shirts. I had to run an errand. It was a simple, 5-minute task so I didn’t make them change; I just told them to get jackets on and hop in the car. The older (eager to please) ones did what I asked, but the two little ones…

As I had just finished buckling everyone up my phone rang. I have been waiting for it to ring… For  years I have had a very intimate relationship with my phone. Ask any of my friends (sorry friends). It would always be close by and I would always be willing it to ring,. But it never did; not in the way I would have liked. My poor mother had to listen to a dejected, “Hello” every time she’d call because my heart literally skipped a beat at my obnoxious ring tone. And every time it rang, I’d stare at the screen in hopes that it would say “Agency” on it. But it didn’t. Until that nippy day when I had just loaded the car full of giggling little people. It rang. I looked down and saw the number. But, it didn’t register. ‘They must be calling for more paperwork’ I thought, ‘They might need another reference’ went my little mind, ‘They probably just got the wrong number.’ So I answered:

“Hello?”

“Hi, Dana, it’s J! How are you??”

“I’m good???” Yes, I answered in the form of a question because I was really asking her if I was about to be good!

“Well, I’m calling with some excellent news!”

“oh!”… {I quickly jumped in the car and put her on speakerphone so we all could hear}

“I’m calling with a child proposal for a little baby. I can’t pronounce the name but this is how you spell it. You need to be in South Africa no later than the 15^th of November………..”…….silence…….”…..are you ok?……”

No one said a word. We couldn’t. None of us. Not my rambunctiously, joyfully loud children, not me…I just squeezed my eyes tight thinking that I was going to wake up at any moment to realize this was another dream. But when I opened them, I saw 4 little pairs of eyes, welled up. No joke. This was real.

“Dana?”

“Yes….oh…..yes. Thank you…..Thank you”

And that was that. The call that turned 4 years of hoping and praying into joy; nothing but joy.
We then frantically drove out to our property {with my kids still in shorts in the FREEZING cold…{bad parenting move on my part…keep in mind our house is a glorified wood shed right now} where I thought Nik was busy putting in windows. He had been busy doing that, but after passing him on the highway I called him and he told me that he had to pop back into the village to run an errand of his own. I kept on my way and decided to bombard him with the happy news when he returned back. But, what I didn’t know was that he received his own special call from our amazing adoption practitioner. His call went something like this:

“Hi Nik, have you talked to Dana yet?”

“No, not for a little bit”

“Are you aware that you received a referral?”

“Wait, what???!?!?!?!”

“You received a referral for…..”

“WAIT, STOP, TIME-OUT….I’ll see Dana in 5 minutes, I’ll call you back!”

He raced back to find us at the house….we just kind of stared at each other. Both not really knowing if the other person knew. Nik whipped out his phone and called Deanna so that we could get all the details that we needed and made an appointment to finally, officially accept a child proposal. We leave on Nov 11th or 13th, we are still ironing out details.
Because of the fact that our baby is not officially ours, we can not publicly share the gender or age or share pictures. But please know that seeing that little life for the first time was just like seeing any one of my 4 kids as they were laid on my chest…a mother’s love. We can’t wait to share more with you! Thank you for following along, even when it seemed like nothing was happening. In fact, everything was happening: this little baby was being born, cared for and Sovereignly placed in our lives, forever.